3D Printer or Seamstress?

Oral-B is bringing the dentist into the bathroom with the world’s first smartphone-connected toothbrush, a device that gives personalised advice to help people improve their brushing. The toothbrush, which will be widely available from June, has a Bluetooth 4.0 link to a smartphone app that can be programmed with the help of a dentist so you pay more attention to any areas of the mouth being neglected.

“Dentists always tell us: ‘People do a great job in the week before they come to visit us and in the week after they visit us,” Oral-B says, “but nothing can hide the fact that when we look inside the mouth, we can see all the areas they miss.” The app will provide real-time guidance in terms of how to brush, and you will be able to fully personalise the brushing routine for you. Oral-B has been trying similar things with its SmartSeries for a while now, but this latest attempt looks to do away with clunky hardware and integrate with your smartphone instead.

Video of the week

Jimmy Fallon kicked off his tenure of the Tonight Show last week and in doing so took over the Internet. It was vintage Jimmy, making the audience feel right at home with another hilarious rendition of his much-loved Evolution skit that proved even more popular online, with over 10 million views so far.

This time, with a little help from Will Smith, Jimmy reminded us of hip hop dances of generations past in the Evolution of Dance.

So far, 3D printed clothing has yet to produce truly wearable products. We’ve seen fashion-as-art and plenty of jewellery and accessories but a new company called Electroloom wants to expand this market by 3D printing basics, like T-shirts and sweaters. Electroloom, founded by entrepreneur Aaron Rowley, is an in-development 3D printer for creating customized, on-demand apparel. It still has a way to go though. So far, Rowley and his team have managed to print sheets and tubes of polymer fabric with the machine. The company’s recent grant will allow them to pursue more complicated shapes, like T-shirts. Natural fibers like cottons and furs are more easily destroyed during the printing process, so while they prototype and search for a solution, Electroloom will use synthetic materials, or a mix of natural and synthetic.

Eventually, Rowley envisions an online database with crowdsourced designs. “We think it may also be practical to provide basic templates – T-shirts, beanies, and the like for users who may not be entirely design savvy,” he said. First up for Electroloom? “Perhaps a beanie.”

Website of the week

Do angry people tilt their heads more strongly? What is a characteristic mood for people in Moscow?

Thanks to Selfie City, you can now find the answer to these questions and more! Selfie City is an immersive project that investigates and analyses a sample of 3,200 selfies taken across New York, Moscow, Berlin, Bangkok, and Sao Paulo. Selfie city delves into the demographics of the ‘selfie’, focusing on individuals to get a sense of the greater city, rather than the community as a whole. You can even input your gender, age, and how you favour your selfie (no smile, no glasses, no face tilt) and see dozens of other New Yorkers who have taken photos of themselves in a similar way to yourself.

Felix Faire, a designer, musician and creative coder, has turned hard surfaces into harmonic instruments by translating recognised impulses into melodic notes. The installation, dubbed Contact, is currently a part of the Sensing Spaces event held at the Royal Academy in London.

Contact uses contact microphones, passive sonar and waveform analysis to recognise information of touches. The sound received from the contact microphones is digitally “resonated” to produce a melodic note from the original acoustic impulse. The wrist and fingernail hits trigger classic 808 Kick and Clap sounds instantaneously and the audio can be recorded and played back with a custom built loop pedal.

The LEAP Motion controller was used to manipulate these sounds with various hand gestures that importantly avoid contact with the table. The projections were designed to visualise the impulses and vibrations generated from playing the Contact table, creating a live audio visual performance instrument.

App of the week

ThirdLove, described as “quick and impressively accurate,” uses advanced image recognition technology to size up women’s body shape and size in relation to the selfies on her smarphone. It’s the ultimate personalised shopping experience app, literally in the hands of consumers.